Use a photo to engage your readers.

[A Clear Blogging Tip.]

Today's Clear Blogging tip: Use photos in your posts to engage your readers.

Unless you're managing to channel the ghost of Hemingway, there are times - frequent times - when an interesting photo makes all the difference between a hum-drum post and a post your readers remember.

Here's three surefire sources for those inspiring, illustrating or just plain interesting shots when you need them:

• Flickr Creative Commons Photos - I know that many bloggers consider anything found at flickr to be fair game, but I respect other people's creative work in the optimistic hope others will do the same for me. So when I go searching at Flickr, I start here - http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ - and look for art with the least restrictive Creative Commons license (Attribution). And I make it a point to try to link the photo back to where I found it on flickr. If I can't find the right image among about five million photos, I move on to my next source.
• iStockPhoto - with nearly 2 million shots and a cost of a dollar per shot for use on a blog, iStockPhoto is a great source for blog inspiration and illustration.
• My own shots, historical or staged. Have camera, will shoot! Start putting that digital camera to work in your blog.

As for software, the key thing to look for is software that will reduce the size in pixels and the size of the file your readers will be downloading. On Windows, I've used Adobe Photoshop Elements for years; on the Mac I'm using GraphicConverter. You can even use Google's free Picasa photo management software, as this tutorial shows.

Comments

[Rose]

Great tip Bob! For awhile I was using photos. I should start doing that again.

[Michael from Pro Blog Design]

Nice tip. Do you think that the photo needs to be related to the content?

On my blog, I use photos with each post (All legal, like you said), and try to make them related.

I've seen many other blogs however which don't bother with relating the images at all. The result is that they can choose the most fantastic looking images they find. They just don't mean a lot.

What's your take on that?

[Tim Haughton]

Another point worth making, if a reader is scanning down posts in Google Reader or similar, pictures slow the eye down, increasing chances of a click through.